Earth Spirit Dreaming: Shamanic Ecotherapy Practices - Elizabeth E. Meacham 2020

Everything Is Connected: A Brief Introduction to Visionary Environmental Thought
Introduction

My personal mindfulness experiences in nature — watching myself and the nature of my mind while I watch, say, a river — allow me to see myself much more clearly. Like the river, my mind is a flow that moves uniquely, yet consistently, over the same bumps and crevices. Like the river, the movements of my mind become well-known to me. When we watch water, we don’t know exactly how the water will look. Water is endlessly creative and always moves uniquely, but we know that unless it is stopped, we can count on it flowing over the same rocks. Watching ourselves amidst the ambiance of nature rituals, seeing ourselves reflected in the river, the tree, the bug, the wind, the sun, helps us reconnect with the natural rhythms that are the basic structure of our being and experience. On a psychological and cultural level, the core truth of ecology, that an organism can only be understood in the context of our natural environment, is equally true of the human person. On a spiritual level, understanding our primary connection and responsibility to our natural environment is essential to understanding our ethical tasks as individuals and communities.

My experience with rivers is beautifully reflected in the currents of awe that mingle with theory in Western visionary environmental thought. The single most important, and awe-inspiring, idea from the past century of environmental thought can be expressed in one deceptively simple maxim: everything is connected. This is both a philosophical idea and an opportunity for experiencing ourselves in new ways that shift our underlying beliefs, thereby transforming our actions. By fostering the relational senses that flow from the realization that everything is connected, we move toward re-indigenized ways of knowing. By following the trail of our own intellectual evolution, we resume our ancestral sense of belonging and place on a local, planetary and cosmic scale. As we live into the truth that everything is connected, the locus of personal and communal meaning begins to shift.

As a thinker and teacher, I am most influenced by these streams in environmental thought: participatory thinking, deep ecology, spiritual ecology and ecopsychology. While my work derives from Western thought, it is important to acknowledge that Anglo-environmental thought is deeply influenced by Eastern spiritual perspectives and indigenous ways of knowing. While I call the thinkers discussed in this chapter the theoretical basis of my work, and they certainly are, they are also poets singing the glory of the natural world and the cosmos. Scholarly writing often transitions to sacred reverence for the Earth in the pages of the books I will mention, capturing the reawakening of the Western mind to the enchantment of the world.